video work, awesomeness

Over the past couple weeks, I think the video remixes that intrigued me the most were Phil Solomon’s machinima films. The content of the work was extremely compelling. While Solomon made use of new media and technology he didn’t rely on its newness to make it interesting. While his choice of Grand Theft Auto wasn’t arbitrary and he used what the game had to offer to his advantage, they could have stood on their own as traditional films as well. For me, as someone who has not been exposed to a great deal of digital art, they were incredibly inspiring as an example of the potential and power of new media in terms of innovation, cultural relevance, and the ability to use everything in our environment in ways completely apart from its intended use. Obviously this last point can be seen as threatening to the original (as evidenced by the paperwork from the Yes Men’s lawsuit that Erin sent out) but it also invites rebuttal (the plaintiff claimed that their “acts are antithetical to public debate on important issues, because they prevent the public and the press from knowing the true position of the intellectual property owner…” Bullshit… I’d love to see the “intellectual property owner” remix the Yes Men but they’re undoubtedly too greedy and lazy.) I feel like a lot of the new media work that I have seen outside of this class has operated within the idea that because the media is new-ish, the work is innovative enough for the content to be secondary. As a result I rarely found myself relating to new media work so it’s nice to be exposed to new media art that is actually good, and furthermore, when it is, holy fuck is it good.

This reflects the conflict that David Fodel talked about in reference to the VJ producing art instead of just wallpaper. I was really impressed with the amount of critical discourse concerning VJ on Vague Terrain and VJ Theory because I think a lot of times it is dismissed as simply aesthetic supplement. In particular I enjoyed what Michael Betancourt said in “Wallpaper and/as Art” about engaging the work rather than consuming it. This audience engagement in relation to digital work recalls Walter Benjamin’s description of collective engagement as it relates to film and the destruction of the aura; it is interesting that Betancourt applies aura and capitalism to digital work in another essay, “The Aura of the Digital.”